By Harry Annison, Kate Paradine

In this article we sketch a vision that might guide academic and third sector collaboration. We do so by drawing on a project that involved collaboration with a range of stakeholders, in order to stimulate ongoing discussion about how academics and the third sector might work together to seek positive change. Our findings show that there are keenly felt challenges, but also a sense of resilient optimism. A key finding among our stakeholders was a sense that there is an absence of an overarching shared vision, which was experienced by many of our respondents as consequential. Therefore, in the spirit of constructive provocation we set out such a vision, which was collaboratively developed with our respondents: opening a dialogue, rather than providing a conclusive position.

Howard Journal of Crime and Justice, May 2024 (early view)

By Allison P. Harris

How does racial diversity impact institutional outcomes and (in)equality? Discussions about diversity usually focus on how individuals’ identities shape their behavior, but diversity is a group-level characteristic. Scholars must, therefore, consider the relationship between group composition and the individual decisions that shape institutional outcomes. Using felony data from a large U.S. court system, I explore the relationship between racial diversity among the judges comprising a court and individual judges’ decisions. I find that as the percent of Black judges in a courthouse increases white judges are less likely to render incarceration sentences in cases with Black defendants. Increases in racial diversity decrease the Black–white gap in the probability of incarceration by up to 7 percentage points. However, I find no relationship between judge’s racial identities and disparities in their decisions. This study highlights the importance of conceptualizing diversity as a group characteristic and the relationship between institutional context and outcomes.

American Political Science Review, 2023, 16 pages

By Thomas Frampton

Supreme Court opinions involving race and the jury invariably open with the Fourteenth Amendment, the Civil Rights Act of 1875, or landmark cases like Strauder v. West Virginia (1880). Legal scholars and historians unanimously report that free people of color did not serve as jurors, in either the North or South, until 1860. In fact, this Article shows, Black men served as jurors in antebellum America decades earlier than anyone has previously realized. While instances of early Black jury service were rare, campaigns insisting upon Black citizens’ admission to the jury-box were not. From the late 1830s onward, Black activists across the country organized to abolish the all-white jury. They faced, and occasionally overcame, staunch resistance. This Article uses jury lists, court records, convention minutes, diaries, bills of sale, tax rolls, and other overlooked primary sources to recover these forgotten efforts, led by activists who understood the jury-box to be both a marker and maker of citizenship. A broader historical perspective—one that centers Black activists in the decades before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868—offers a new way of thinking about the relationship between race, rights, citizenship, and the jury.

 New York University Law Review, 2024, 66 pages

By User Voice

This report brings forth the experiences of people who are diagnosed and self-diagnose as neurodivergent. As the health and criminal justice sectors are learning more about the experiences of neurodivergent service users, User Voice wants to bring their voices front and centre, and to give them real agency. Their quotes are unedited and based on their personal experiences. As part of this study User Voice interviewed 104 service users across 11 prisons nationwide between September 2022 and February 2023. To gain as full a picture as possible, User Voice additionally surveyed 250 neurodivergent service users about their experiences in the criminal justice system. All interviewed or surveyed service users were either diagnosed or self-diagnosed as neurodivergent. To provide as holistic a picture as possible, User Voice spoke to service users about their lives before they were involved in the criminal justice system. In early life, most service users we spoke to came from lower socio-economic backgrounds, over half had experienced abuse and neglect, and one third had been in care. At a crisis point, service users often found that they did not have the needed support networks, and therefore as a result, many had turned to alcohol and drugs which then had led to a life of criminality. Many told us that due to their neurodiversity, they are easily manipulated, coerced, groomed, or susceptible to peer pressure. This report shines a light on the lack of support for people who end up in the criminal justice system. Half of the service users who took part in this report told us they had been diagnosed before they turned 17 years old. Nine had been diagnosed between ages 17 – 26, and 17 when they were older than 27 years. None of them had been told how to live with their conditions. This study finds a criminal justice system ill-prepared to help neurodivergent people. In police custody, only 2 service users had adjustments made around their neurodiversity, whereas in prison, 15 said adjustments had been made. Because of lack of assessments and screening in prisons, we found that only few were receiving the support they needed. We believe that lived experience has a crucial part to play in the formulation of policy and practice in every sector, whether it be criminal justice, health, or education. To benefit those who are neurodivergent, we advocate for more peer support as well employing staff with lived experience in neurodiversity. This would guarantee that services and resources are tailored to the needs of neurodivergent service users. As prison populations grow, a commitment to more neurodiversity qualified health care staff is a must. The prison population would benefit from clinical psychologists in prison as well as better management of medication. This report is a snapshot of people’s lived experience. To drive true reform, we hope that more resources are given to projects that share the voices and experiences of neurodivergent people. To stop neurodivergent people ending up in the criminal justice system, we need to learn from those who have been there.

London: User Voice, 2023. 41p

By Andrew Galley,  Frank Sirotich, and Sara Rodrigues  

This report is based on a scoping review by a team of researchers at the Canadian Mental Health Association (CMHA), who analyzed existing research and policy documents on the mental health care needs of justice-involved persons in Canada’s criminal justice system and in peer jurisdictions. It aims to guide future research and policy development by highlighting what is currently known about this topic and what knowledge gaps may exist in the literature on mental health in the criminal justice system. While it highlights research on the prevalence of mental health problems and mental illness in the criminal justice system, experiences of justice-involved persons with mental health problems and mental illness, and promising practices and principles for mental health care, it is not intended to be a comprehensive review of the literature.   

Ottawa: Mental Health Commission of Canada , 2020. 124p.

By Birth Companions

In this briefing paper we shine a spotlight on the issues faced by women who have contact with both the criminal justice and children’s social care systems during pregnancy and the first two years of their child’s life. We outline the context, highlight key evidence, and share some powerful contributions from our Lived Experience Team who have experienced this ‘dual contact’. 

UK: Birth Companions, 2023. 25p.

By Keith Finlay, Matthew Gross, Carl Lieberman, Elizabeth Luh and Michael Mueller-Smith

We estimate the impact of financial sanctions in the U.S. criminal justice system using nine distinct natural experiments across five states. These regression discontinuities capture a range of enforcement levels ($17–$6,000) and institutional environments, providing robust causal evidence and external validity. We leverage survey and administrative data to consider a variety of short and long-term outcomes including employment, recidivism, household expenditures, spousal spillovers, and other self-reported measures of well-being. We find consistent, robust evidence of precise null effects on the population, including ruling out long-run impacts larger than -$347–$168 in annual earnings and -0.002–0.01 in annual convictions. 

Unpublished paper, 2023. 60p.

By Colette Barry, Chalen Westaby, Mark Coen, Niamh Howlin

Judges are required to suppress and manage their own emotions as well as those of other court users and staff in their everyday work. Previous studies have examined the complex emotional labour undertaken by judges, but there is limited research on the emotion management performed by judges in their interactions with jurors. Drawing on a qualitative study of judge–jury relations in criminal trials in Ireland, we illustrate how judges learn and habituate emotional labour practices through informal and indirect processes. Judges described managing their emotions to demonstrate impartiality and objectivity. Their accounts also underline the importance of balancing presentations of neutrality with empathy, as well as being mindful of the potential emotional toll of jury service on jurors.

Journal of Law and Society Volume 50, Issue 4 p. 477-499

By Criminal Justice Joint Inspectorates: UK

In this report, the Criminal Justice Joint Inspectorates focus on recruitment and retention in the agencies that they inspect. The report draws on evidence from inspections conducted by each of the individual inspectorates, both jointly and singly, of the police, the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS), the Probation and Youth Offending Services and the Prison Service. It sets out the findings from this work, as well as cross-cutting themes. It concludes by highlighting signs of progress as well as ongoing risks to the criminal justice system.

United Kingdom, CJJI. 2024, 19pg

By Meredith Rossner and Helen Taylor

Restorative justice is an idea and a practice that has had a significant impact on criminology over the past four decades and has proliferated throughout the criminal justice system. Yet from the beginning of this movement, there have been worries that the mainstreaming of restorative justice will lead to its dilution, or even corruption, and undermine its transformative potential. Developing alongside the growing institutionalization of restorative justice has been a transformative justice movement that has arisen from larger movements for racial and gender justice, drawing on similar foundational values to restorative justice. This review interrogates the relationship between restorative and transformative justice by examining a flourishing of ideas and experiments at the margins of the restorative justice movement in three key areas—responses to racial injustice, sexual violence, and environmental harm—and finds that restorative justice has the capacity to work at multiple levels to respond to harm, transform relationships, and prevent future injustices.

Annual Review of Criminology, Volume 7, Page 357 - 381

By Rainer Forst

Over the past 15 years, Rainer Forst has developed a fundamental research programme within the tradition of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The core of this programme is a moral account of the basic right of justification that humans owe to one another as rational beings. This account is put to work by Forst in articulating - both historically and philosophically - the contexts and form of justice and of toleration. The result is a powerful theoretical framework within which to address issues such as transnational justice and multicultural toleration. In this volume, Forst sets out his ideas in an extended essay, which is responded to be influential interlocutors including: Andrea Sangiovanni, Amy Allen, Kevin Olson, Anthony Laden, Eva Erman and Simon Caney. The volume concludes with Forst's response to his interlocutors.

London: Bloomsbury Academic,  2014.  249p.

By Sarah Waite

This article examines women’s experiences of moving from a closed to an open prison in England. Transition to an open prison is often viewed in a positive, reformist light and although androcentric auto-ethnographical work has demonstrated challenges associated with this pivot when serving a long-term sentence, much less is known about the experiences of women. Using interview discussions, this article draws upon the concept of transcarceral habitus to examine experiences of transfer and adaptation to the open prison within the broader context of the lives of criminalised women. By extending our understanding of the women’s open prison as a site of punishment and recognising the connections and pluralities of women’s carceral experiences, this article seeks to disrupt unhelpful binaries that legitimise the incarceration of women and the open prison estate.

United Kingdom, Howard Journal of Crime and Criminal Justice. Oct. 2023, 16pg

By Heather Harris, with research support from Thomas Sloan

Adopting untested policies helped California courts resolve criminal charges safely amid a public health crisis. Of the main policies, only remote hearings have endured—and their future is uncertain. Assembly Bill 199 allows California courts to conduct most criminal hearings remotely only through 2023.

This report chronicles how the COVID-19 pandemic affected the courts in 2020, describes policy responses, and assesses the impact of remote hearing policies on conviction and sentencing outcomes within six months of arrest.

Pandemic conditions challenged the courts’ capacity to resolve cases. An estimated 55,000 criminal cases that would have completed within six months remained unresolved at the end of 2020.→

Courts acted swiftly to adapt to pandemic conditions. Three main strategies included modifying pretrial release to reduce jail populations, permitting remote hearings, and extending case timelines.→

Uneven adoption of policies, coupled with geographic differences in where people live, meant that Black and Latino defendants had greater potential than people of other races to experience pandemic policies.→

Remote hearing policies reinforced pandemic trends for lower conviction rates, but counteracted trends in sentencing. When remote hearing policies were in place, rates of conviction within six months of arrest fell, with outcomes for white, Latino, and Black people driving this result. Misdemeanor convictions were less likely to lead to jail and more likely to receive noncustodial sentences such as probation and money sanctions, mainly for white, Latino, and Black people. Felony convictions were less likely to result in prison and more likely to lead to jail, and outcomes for Black people dominated this result.→

Remote hearing policies contributed to racial differences in criminal case outcomes. Inequity in conviction and jail sentence rates narrowed between white and Latino defendants and between white and Black defendants. By contrast, racial inequity widened in the likelihood of being sentenced to money sanctions and probation.→

Arguably, whether a criminal proceeding is conducted virtually or in person should not influence whether a person is convicted or how they are sentenced; yet remote hearing policies have affected both. Before Assembly Bill 199 expires, policymakers will need to determine whether these outcomes are desirable and how to factor them into decisions about whether to allow criminal cases to proceed remotely.

San Francisco: Public Policy Institute of California, 2023.

By Sixth Amendment Center and The Defender Initiative

In 1963, the U.S. Supreme Court declared in Gideon v. Wainwright that it is an “obvious truth” that anyone accused of a crime who cannot afford the cost of a lawyer “cannot be assured a fair trial unless counsel is provided for him.” In the intervening 58 years, the U.S. Supreme Court has clarified that the Sixth Amendment right to counsel means every person who is accused of a crime is entitled to have an attorney provided at government expense to defend him in all federal and state courts whenever that person is facing the potential loss of his liberty and is unable to afford his own attorney. Moreover, the appointed lawyer needs to be more than merely a warm body with a bar card. The attorney must also be effective, the U.S. Supreme Court said again in United States v. Cronic in 1984, subjecting the prosecution’s case to “the crucible of meaningful adversarial testing.” Under Gideon, the Sixth Amendment right to effective counsel is an obligation of the states under the due process clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. The State of Illinois delegates to its county boards and circuit court judges most of its constitutional obligation to ensure the provision of effective assistance of counsel to indigent criminal defendants in the trial courts. Yet the state does not have any oversight structure by which to know whether each county’s indigent defense system has a sufficient number of attorneys with the necessary time, training, and resources to provide effective assistance of counsel at every critical stage of a criminal case for each and every indigent defendant. This is the first of three findings of this report. As explained in chapter I, this report is the result of a statewide evaluation of the provision of the right to counsel in adult criminal cases at the trial level, conducted at the request of the Illinois Supreme Court. Through data collection and analysis, interviews with criminal justice stakeholders, and courtroom observations, the evaluation assessed indigent defense services against national standards and Sixth Amendment caselaw that establish the hallmarks of a structurally sound indigent representation system, which include the early appointment of qualified and trained attorneys, who have sufficient time and resources to provide effective representation under independent supervision. The absence of any of these factors can show that a system is presumptively providing ineffective assistance of counsel. This evaluation focuses closely on the practices of nine counties – Champaign, Cook, DuPage, Gallatin, Hardin, LaSalle, Mercer, Schuyler, and Stephenson – which taken together illustrate the wide variations among Illinois county governments and courts in their efforts to fulfill the Sixth Amendment right to counsel. The State of Illinois delegates to its counties and trial court judges the responsibility for providing and overseeing attorneys to effectively represent indigent defendants, and it delegates to its counties nearly all of the responsibility for funding the right to counsel of indigent defendants. When a state chooses to delegate its federal constitutional responsibilities to its local governments and courts, the state must guarantee not only that these local bodies are capable of providing effective representation but also that they are in fact doing so. Yet Illinois is one of just seven states that do not have any state commission, state agency, or state officer with oversight of any aspect of trial-level indigent representation services in adult criminal cases. Chapter II details the framework that Illinois has established for its county-level criminal justice systems and how that framework has been implemented in the nine sample counties. The indigent defense systems in the nine representative counties of this evaluation vary greatly. With 102 counties in the state, it is likely that any or all of those counties present even greater variations in their indigent defense systems. Without oversight, the State of Illinois cannot accurately say how many people or cases, and of what case types, require appointed counsel nor by whom the representation is being provided, if at all, and the State of Illinois cannot know how much the provision of indigent representation should cost nor how to provide it effectively in all 102 counties. Instead, policy decisions about indigent defense systems are left to anecdote, speculation, and potentially even bias. Chapters III through VII comprise the substantive assessment, which relate the basis of our second and third findings: The state’s limited framework for how county boards and circuit court judges are to establish and implement the indigent defense system in each county institutionalizes political and judicial interference with the appointed attorneys’ independence to act in the stated legal interests of their indigent clients. This lack of independence causes systemic conflicts of interest that interfere with the provision of effective assistance of counsel. 3. The indigent defense systems established in Illinois’ counties lack oversight and accountability that can result in a constructive denial of the right to counsel to at least some indigent defendants, and in some instances can result in the actual denial of the right to counsel to at least some indigent defendants. An indigent defense system’s effectiveness must be measured by the representation it provides to its appointed clients. The U.S. Supreme Court explained in Cronic that “[t]he right to the effective assistance of counsel” means that the defense must put the prosecution’s case through the “crucible of meaningful adversarial testing.” For this to occur, U.S. Supreme Court case law provides that an indigent person must be represented by a qualified and trained attorney, who is appointed early in the case, and who has sufficient time and resources to provide effective representation under independent supervision.

Boston: Sixth Amendment Center, 2021. 181p.

By Russell M. Gold and Kay L. Levine

For decades police and prosecutors have controlled the public narrative about criminal law—littering the news landscape with salacious stories of violent crimes while ignoring the more mundane but far more prevalent minor cases that clog the court dockets. Defenders, faced with overwhelming caseloads and fear that speaking out may harm their clients, have largely ceded the opportunity to offer a counternarrative based on what they see every day. Defenders tell each other about overuse of pretrial detention, intensive pressure to plead guilty, overzealous prosecutors, cycles of violence, and rampant constitutional violations— all of which inflict severe harm on defendants and their loved ones. But defenders rarely show the public the world they inhabit.

That approach hasn’t stopped the carceral state from ballooning over the past fifty years; public defense budgets remain paltry, and clients suffer from too much law and too little justice in a system that disregards and dehumanizes them. This Article encourages defenders to go on the offensive, to seek transformative change toward a more just legal system. It builds on the social media literature to analyze how defenders can strategically use social networking sites to add their expertise to ongoing public debates about crime and criminal justice policy. As a few existing efforts suggest, social media enables defenders to widely share the routine injustices they observe and to engage with local grassroots organizations to build coalitions. Defenders’ strategic use of social media won’t change policies overnight, but we are hopeful that it will augment public support for defenders and their clients and build power to transform the criminal legal landscape over decades.

Gold, Russell M. and Levine, Kay L., The Public Voice of the Defender (July 14, 2023). 75 Alabama Law Review (Forthcoming), U of Alabama Legal Studies Research Paper #4416723, Emory Legal Studies Research Paper No. 23-4,

By Brandon L. Garrett and Gregory Mitchell

William Blackstone famously expressed the view that convicting the innocent constitutes a much more serious error than acquitting the guilty. This view is the cornerstone of due process protections for those accused of crimes, giving rise to the presumption of innocence and the high burden of proof required for criminal convictions. While most legal elites share Blackstone’s view, the citizen jurors tasked with making due process protections a reality do not share the law’s preference for false acquittals over false convictions.

Across multiple national surveys sampling more than 12,000 people, we find that a majority of Americans consider false acquittals and false convictions to be errors of equal magnitude. Contrary to Blackstone, most people are unwilling to err on the side of letting the guilty go free to avoid convicting the innocent. Indeed, a sizeable minority view false acquittals as worse than false convictions; this group is willing to convict multiple innocent persons to avoid letting one guilty person go free. These value differences translate into behavioral differences: we show in multiple studies that jury-eligible adults who reject Blackstone’s view are more accepting of prosecution evidence and are more conviction-prone than the minority of potential jurors who agree with Blackstone.

These findings have important implications for our understanding of due process and criminal justice policy. Due process currently depends on jurors faithfully following instructions on the burden of proof, but many jurors are not inclined to hold the state to its high burden. Courts should do away with the fiction that the reasonable doubt standard guarantees due process and consider protections that do not depend on jurors honoring the law’s preference for false acquittals, such as more stringent pretrial screening of criminal cases and stricter limits on prosecution evidence. Further, the fact that many people place crime control on par with, or above, the need to avoid wrongful convictions helps explain divisions in public opinion on important policy questions like bail and sentencing reform. Criminal justice proposals that emphasize deontic concerns without addressing consequentialist concerns are unlikely to garner widespread support.

121 Mich. L. Rev. 707 (2023).

By Ronald Wright and Jenny Roberts

This review collects and critiques the academic literature on criminal defense lawyering, with an emphasis on empirical work. Research on criminal defense attorneys in the United States has traditionally emphasized scarcity of resources: too many people facing criminal charges who are “too poor to pay” for counsel and not enough funding to pay for the constitutionally mandated lawyers. Scholars have focused on the capacity of different delivery systems, such as public defender offices, to change the ultimate outcomes in criminal cases within their tight budgetary constraints. Over the decades, however, theoretical understandings of the defense attorney’s work have expanded to include client interests outside the criminal courtroom, reaching the broader social conditions connected to the alleged criminal act. Researchers have responded by asking a broader range of questions about the effectiveness of defense counsel outside the courtroom and by using improved data to study the effectiveness of lawyers at discrete procedural stages.

Annu. Rev. Criminol. 2023. 6:241–64

By SE Duhart Clarke

The right to an attorney in criminal cases is a constitutional right covered under the Sixth and Fourteenth Amendments of the United States Constitution and is considered fundamental to a fair trial. Over two-thirds of criminal court defendants in the United States are unable to afford their own counsel and thus have an attorney given to them by the court (i.e., indigent defendants). Many legal scholars have debated the effectiveness of indigent defense counsel compared to privately retained counsel. However, in the absence of synthesized data on outcomes for indigent defendants, legal scholars commonly cite the pragmatic and theoretical mechanisms for publicly funded defenders’ limitations or strengths to support their arguments about the effectiveness of indigent defense counsel. When empirical evidence on outcomes for indigent defendants is used to support an argument, the research cited is often limited to studies conducted in specific jurisdictions on a specific step in court case processing. Consequently, our overall understanding of outcomes experienced by indigent defendants is limited and disjointed, underscoring the need for a systematic evaluation of the current empirical literature. The goal of the study in this dissertation was to conduct a systematic literature review and meta-analysis on outcomes for defendants with public defenders, defendants with assigned counsel, and defendants with retained attorneys to better understand what (if any) discrepancies exist in criminal justice-related outcomes as a function of indigent defense status. Specifically, this study examined the current empirical literature on pretrial outcomes, case outcomes, sentencing outcomes, and post-case outcomes for indigent defendants compared to defendants with private/retained attorneys and/or public defenders compared to assigned counsel.

 Raleigh NC: North Carolina State University, 2021.112p.

Edited by Francesca Galli, Anne Weyembergh

Criminal law has undergone tremendous changes in the past decades. A number of new trends have been challenging the traditional features of “modern criminal law” as founded by Cesare Beccaria in the 18th century and developed thereafter. Some authors describe a process of “disengagement” from the fundamental principles upon which “modern criminal law” is based. They point to its corollary, the rise of the ideology of pragmatism, which, in the name of efficiency, is gradually transforming the whole philosophy underpinning the criminal justice system. Some of them thus refer to the “post-modernisation” of criminal law . Among the new trends affecting criminal justice systems, one of them has attracted considerable academic attention in the last few years. This is the so-called “Europeanisation process”, which is the result of the growing intervention of the EU in the area of criminal law. Criminal law and criminal procedure are deeply rooted in national sovereignty and had therefore been developed at national level only. However, since the entry into force of the Amsterdam Treaty, the EU has taken a lead in the approximation of criminal legislation and has developed new and closer cooperation mechanisms based on principles such as the mutual recognition of decisions in criminal matters . With the entry into force of the Lisbon Treaty, the EU’s scope for intervention in this field has been considerably broadened and its supranational nature strengthened, thereby challenging the narrow and profound link between criminal law and the nation state even more. Another new trend which criminal law and other legal disciplines are facing is the increasingly blurred dividing lines between legal categories. Several authors have highlighted the existence of a general blur . Various dimensions of this blur have been identified in legal literature . As will be highlighted by other authors in this book , the verb and the noun “blur” have rather negative connotations. As a verb, it is defined as the action of making or becoming vague or less distinct, of making less clear, of smearing or smudging. As a noun, “blur” means vague, hazy or indistinct . Law and lawyers are not at ease when faced with vagueness and lack of clarity. This is especially true for criminal law and criminal lawyers, as is demonstrated by the well-known principle of legality in its substantive dimension. As will be underlined by some authors in the following contributions, these blurred dividing lines can, however, also have a positive impact or at least give rise to a multitude of consequences that cannot all be categorised as negative. This is clear, for instance, when one thinks of the application of criminal procedural guarantees by administrative law or of the so-called Engel line of case law of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR). A growing blur can be observed between criminal and administrative law. Both fields of law have received numerous different definitions . The dividing line between them has never been clear . Their respective scope and/or the criteria dividing their respective jurisdiction can vary depending on the country concerned and on the “approach” followed. The criminal nature of proceedings and of penalties can indeed be considered in a formal or substantial manner. As it is well known in its above-mentioned Engel ruling, the ECtHR follows the second approach when considering whether national proceedings constitute a criminal charge in the sense of Article 6 ECHR . The blur between criminal and administrative law has different manifestations and has a wide variety of origins. The scope of both administrative and criminal law tends to expand. Criminal law is being introduced in fields in which the legislator traditionally adopted administrative measures and vice versa. Fields such as terrorism or trafficking in human beings, which have traditionally been governed by criminal law, are increasingly sprinkled with administrative measures or are becoming fields where administrative actors are increasingly involved. In some domains, a double enforcement/sanctioning system (administrative/criminal) has developed. However, by themselves, these trends do not necessarily result in a blur. A blur occurs when the scope of intervention and the division of functions between both kinds of measures, systems, actors or frameworks are not clear enough; when the two sets of applicable rules become indistinct and/or when there is cross-contamination whereby the interactions between both types of measures, actors or frameworks is not organised and overlaps are neither avoided nor regulated. So, in order to identify a blur, the following questions are of key importance: Are there clear criteria setting out when one or the other actor/framework, or both, should be involved? Are the rules applicable to one or the other framework/actor clearly defined and is there some kind of approximation between them? Is a system of double administrative and penal repression foreseen? Reflecting on the reasons for the growing blur between administrative and criminal law is quite interesting. As will be highlighted in the different contributions to this book, various factors arise, including the advantages of each of the different regimes , the need to find an effective way of dealing with certain kinds of crime that are becoming ever more complex, the need to develop a multidisciplinary/holistic approach towards some crimes, particularly trafficking in human beings, and the will and/or need to prevent crime, especially terrorism, etc. The purpose of this book is to study the combination of both of the abovementioned trends affecting criminal justice systems. The blur between administrative and criminal law has, of course, been around for a while and exists independently of the European Union. It is, for instance, embodied in the blurred line between measures belonging to punitive administrative law and criminal law measures . Up until now, this trend has mainly been analysed at the national level. However, it is interesting to reflect on the interaction between the Europeanisation of criminal law on the one hand and the increasingly blurred line between administrative and criminal law on the other hand. In this regard, the main question that arises is whether and to what extent the EU contributes to the blurred line; if it tries to limit it, control it and/or organise it.

Bruxelles, Editions de l’Université de Bruxelles, 2014. 259p.

Edited by Douglas Edlin

Are judges supposed to be objective? Citizens, scholars, and legal professionals commonly assume that subjectivity and objectivity are opposites, with the corollary that subjectivity is a vice and objectivity is a virtue. These assumptions underlie passionate debates over adherence to original intent and judicial activism.

In Common Law Judging, Douglas Edlin challenges these widely held assumptions by reorienting the entire discussion. Rather than analyze judging in terms of objectivity and truth, he argues that we should instead approach the role of a judge's individual perspective in terms of intersubjectivity and validity. Drawing upon Kantian aesthetic theory as well as case law, legal theory, and constitutional theory, Edlin develops a new conceptual framework for the respective roles of the individual judge and of the judiciary as an institution, as well as the relationship between them, as integral parts of the broader legal and political community. Specifically, Edlin situates a judge's subjective responses within a form of legal reasoning and reflective judgment that must be communicated to different audiences.

Edlin concludes that the individual values and perspectives of judges are indispensable both to their judgments in specific cases and to the independence of the courts. According to the common law tradition, judicial subjectivity is a virtue, not a vice.

Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 281p.